Never Built: Los Angeles - Answers The 'What Ifs' of Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a ‘dream city’ built with endless possibilities. A city full of great history, memories, and structured with remarkable architecture. Living in such as city you soon realize that the opportunities and possibilities are endless, leaving us with the mind-boggling question ‘what if’. What if Los Angeles was built a different way, what if Los Angeles had a monorail, what if there were more city parks, parking, and just a central gathering point in the city.

Thanks to ‘Never Built: Los Angeles’these questions explore just that. It takes the “what if” and sketches it out to be a reality. It’s a thorough compendium of projects that only saw the drawing board, but have now been revealed.

Los Angeles is a city that has been described as a strip mall city without a plan. Everyone dreams what LA could have been. ‘Never Built: Los Angeles’ is a critically acclaimed exhibition presents an LA that might have been—a city full of fantasy and forward thinking structures that was way ahead of time. Currently on view at the Architecture + Design Museum, Never Built: Los Angeles seems to have captured everyone's imagination.

Santa Monica Offshore Freeway. Photo Credit: City of Santa Monica

It’s a small but ambitious museum that answers these questions: What does this show say about the people of LA? Why are we all so curious about what might have been? Is our city so innately imperfect, fascinating and altogether contradictory that we want to cumulatively wave our magic wands and imagine it otherwise?

Philanthropist and LA builder/president of All Coast Construction, Mike Grosswendt, helped make the show possible. Grosswendt has known for some time that this particular museum's vision is important to not only the architecture and art world, but to Los Angeles residents and beyond. According to Grosswendt, “I felt it was essential to sponsor a show of this caliber. When you pull together a century of urban and architectural proposals that were turned down for any number of reasons, from political to financial, you genuinely appreciate and are inspired by the astounding imaginations and hopeful visions of LA. And what you think about most, after seeing the show, is what our future LA could one day become.”